My Top 10 List Of The Best New Mac Mouse Utilities

Bear with me. What got me started on the Top 10 List of Mac Mouse Utilities was checking out a couple of Mac utilities, neither of which make any sense whatsoever.

Wouldn’t it be cool to switch from one Spaces work space to another by whacking your Mac notebook? Not interested? OK, on to the Top 10 List.

Customize Your Mac’s Mouse

For some strange reason it took Apple over 20 years to figure out that Mac users could handle a two-button mouse, hence the Mighty Mouse of a few years ago.

I preferred Mighty Mouse to my old Microsoft Intellimouse.

Other than the goofy little nipple on top, Might Mouse was a decent, somewhat overpriced Apple-branded two-button mouse.

As if Apple needed a beachhead for 21st century pointing devices, out came Magic Mouse a few years later—essentially a track pad in the shape of a mouse; wireless, with no left or right buttons.

Apple wisely incorporated a few of the Mac notebook trackpad features, but not all of them. Enter the enterprising Mac software developers with all kinds of little utilities to improve your life via the mouse.

Top 10 Mac Mouse Utilities

Anything that’s called magic deserves to have advanced super powers, right?

#10 – MondoMouse: Atomic Bird’s MondoMouse is a Mac tool with a few features you won’t find in Mac OS X. For example, point at a window on your Mac’s screen, and simply drag it elsewhere on the screen—no need to click on the title bar.

MondoMouse also resizes windows where they sit, and resizes the aforementioned windows from any corner, not just the lower right corner. This nifty tool also gives you a pop up floating text window as you mouse over a screen of crowded windows, identifying each window below.

#9 – MagicPrefs: Yes, you know I love free. I’m not the resident Mac360 Value Vixen™ because of a rigged election. MagicPrefs works with Apple’s Magic Mouse to give you a bucket of extra trackpad-like features.

Set clicking to one finger, two fingers, three fingers, even four fingers. Set taps the same way. Even turn the Magic Mouse into a trackpad with pinch and drag. Not bad for free, huh?

#8 – MouseWizard: Speaking of magic, what trick isn’t complete with a wizard? MouseWizard can give your Magic Mouse six extra buttons, including pinch, tap to click, bloat, and other trackpad gestures.

It’s not free, but it doesn’t cost much, and it’s free to try out.

#7 – Sesamouse: Magic, wizard, now Sesamouse—another way to get more magical functions into Magic Mouse. Sesamouse says scrolling and wiping are boring so you get more gestures and touches, including pinch magnification, even rotations.

Wipes can be set to trigger Spaces, Dashboard, or Expose. It’s not really free, but Donationware is better than Shareware.

#6 – MoreMagic: Alright, so you’re the secretive type; so secretive you don’t want anyone to know what you can do. So secretive you don’t even know the secrets your Mac’s Magic Mouse can do.

So it is with MoreMagic. This Mac utility is a Preference Pane which lets you speed up the slow tracking on Magic Mouse—perfect for larger screens. There. Now you know the secret. I didn’t guarantee it’d be much of a secret.

#5 – uPointer: More than half of all Macs sold these days are Mac notebooks. That means smaller screens. Yet, iMacs now come with humondoidly large 27-inch screens. You know, sometimes that rinky dinky little Mac mouse pointer gets lost amid the screen clutter.

uPointer to the rescue. Lost your mouse pointer on the screen? Click a key and uPointer points out where the mouse pointer went. Change color, shape, size, circle, cross, line, or crosshair—or make it pulsate or spin. No more lost mouse pointer (why not just make it bigger?).

#4 – teleport: Mac Screen Sharing is a cool thing, but wouldn’t it be even cooler if you could scroll your mouse pointer to the edge of your Mac’s window and have it show up as the pointer on a completely different Mac?

teleport kind of teleports (Beam me up, Scotty) your Mac’s pointer to another Mac on the same network. As an added bonus, teleport lets your keyboard control another Mac. Why? Why do men climb Pamela Anderson’s mountains?

#3 – Keyboard and Mouse Recorder: AlphaOmega Software is not going to make the finals for the Creative Mac App Olympics, but K&MR does what it says it does. Keyboard and Mouse Recorder is a nifty utility that acts like a recorder—it records and plays back keyboard keystrokes, mouse movements, and mouse clicks. Record them, save them, use them again.

#2 – Remote Mouse: If you have an Apple Remote control, you’ll like Remote Mouse, which lets you control your mouse by using your remote. This is funky and labor intensive, but it works. Click the Previous button on the Remote and the mouse pointer moves five pixels to the left. Click the Next button and go five pixels to the right. Click Volume Up or Volume Down buttons, and—you guessed it—five pixels up or down. If you’re an impatient soul, don’t use Remote Mouse.

#1 – KidsMouse: Hey, I’m a mommy. I have three rug rats, curtain climbers, carpet crawlers, and they’re all budding Mac users whose current idea of a good time is to see how far they can throw mommy’s expensive Magic Mouse before the magic light on the bottom goes away.

KidsMouse is really a point and click game for children to teach them Mac mouse etiquette. They learn alphabets, numbers, shapes, colors, and solve simple puzzles—like, where’s mommy’s Magic Mouse and who put it there.

The Mac Notebook Prize Fight

Mac notebooks are interesting little beasts. They take a licking and they keep on ticking. Most recent Mac notebooks also have a seldom used feature—a built in motion sensor. Drop your notebook to the ground and before it gets there, your Mac knows it’s falling and works to protect your hard drive. All that happens in a flash due to the motion sensor.

Hmmmm. What else could a motion sensor do?

Add SlapAMac to your Mac notebook and slap it to move from one Spaces workspace to another.

Seriously. Hey, iPhones let us bump data from one iPhone user to another, so why not slap your Mac to make it do something mundane. I don’t know why, either, but SlapAMac does that and it’s free.

SlapAMac was inspired by SmackBook which does kind of the same thing—physical cruelty to a Mac. Maybe we can get the ASPCA to create a Mac notebook abuse task force.

Our Apple Village Peeps

Kate compares Microsoft Office vs. Apple’s iWork Trio: How The Cloud Levels The Playing Field. But is anyone making any dough? Say, What’s The Better Way To Browse Photos On Flickr? Use The Free Mac App F-Stop. It's very cool.

Elsewhere, Tera has the scoop on A Cheap iPhone With Cheap Colors Coming To A Store Near You. Jeffrey asks the musical question, Whatever Happened To iRadio? And Why Is iTunes Radio Better Than A Subscription? I don't know, either. Finally, Here’s The Easy, Free Way To Track The News From Major Newspapers In The U.S. An RSS reader is better.

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